Archive for March, 2009
Antipodes
Posted by Avi in Miscellanious on March 25th, 2009
When I was growing up, we would often speak about digging a hole in our backyards and winding up in China. As I got older, I always wondered if this was, in fact, true. It turns out that you have to be somewhere in Argentina to pull this off.
ACL in Zend Framework
Posted by Avi in Programming on March 19th, 2009
When I first started using the Zend Framework, one of the most confusing things was the ACL component. Even after I succesfully implemented an ACL solution in my app, something seemed wrong with it.
I would like to argue that the proper use for the Zend ACL is actually impossible, since there is a reported bug in the code which, to my knowledge, has not been fixed.
The use case I will discuss is where you want to only authors to edit articles and only to articles authored by themselves. I think this is a fairly common case.
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Presenting a list of Timezones to the user
Posted by Avi in Programming on March 12th, 2009
I first got into timezones when I working on an calendar app which displayed various times of day which are pertinent to Jewish daily life. The app would display calculated times which of course would differ based on the timezone of the given location. As I investigated into timezones, I found them to be fairly complicated. Not all timezones are even on the hour…some are at 30 minute offsets, some at 45 minutes, and historically there have been even stranger offsets than that.
To make matters worse, there’s the whole issue of Daylight Saving Time. Apparently some places have it some don’t. Some countries have a set date for DST, some pick a new one each year depending on circumstances. And of course, DST does not mean only adding one hour.
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